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What's Out There is More of Here by David Alexanderpublished in Volume 3, Issue 1 on February 8th, 1996

Yin and yang revolve in endless permutations, and every action
contains the seeds of its antithesis. Marty, now Tulku, is
neither Marty nor Tulku, for both follow the path of becoming.
Only the process of becoming is real, and even this is illusion.
Neither Tulku, nor the steam grate outside the building on Park
Avenue upon which Tulku squats in the lotus position, have any
true substance. Both are manifestations of samsara, the
world of phenomena.

When Tulku was Marty Kellerman, a computer technician for the
Sperry Rand Company, he lived in a co-op apartment on York Avenue
not far from the steam grate upon which he now sits. When Tulku
was Marty Kellerman, he pulled down sixty grand a year, minus
bonuses and perks, administering the sprawling LAN into which
hundreds of PCs, printers, modems and other hardware were plugged
and which was itself plugged into the global Internet. When Tulku
was Marty Kellerman, he liked having drinks at Manhattan's
preferred watering holes, betting on the ponies and trading up to
a new Mazda each year. He knew nothing of metaphysics and cared
even less. Marty Kellerman was nuts and bolts to the core.

Just the same, Marty's samsaric yang was already evolving into
Tulku's nirvanic yin. Marty just didn't know it yet. By the
ineluctable laws of dharma, his co-op in the doorman
building on York was becoming the steam grate on Park. His Pierre
Balmain suits the grimy layers of second-hand clothing he now
wore. His wife a divorcee. His computer LAN the all-embracing
Vishnu-network of the astral plane. His former life dissolved, as
though it had never been. All of this had happened barely two
years before, and the moment at which yin and yang began to
switch position was the Archimedian point about which all of
these cosmic perambulations turned.

The van that departed the Club Med at Vishakapatnam one humid
morning was rented as a joke. Marty and his wife Eileen had gone
to Club Med for all the usual reasons. But the endless round of
eating, racquetball, fucking and watching half-naked women flirt
with three-quarters naked men by the pool and at beachside became
boring in the extreme. Eileen wanted Marty to attend yoga class
with her, and to this he reluctantly gave his assent. It was at
yoga class that they met Dan and Dawn, who were agents of
Bodhisattvahood, only they didn't suspect it.

"You know, they say there's a holy man up in the hills
near here who gives audiences," Dan remarked after yoga
class one day. "Dawn and I and another couple were thinking
of renting a van from one of the navvies and having a look. Care
to come along?"

"You wanted to work on your tan this week, honey,"
Marty countered, hoping she would get the message that he wanted
to lose Dan and Dawn, who were obvious flakes.

"Oh, forget the tan," she insisted. "This is
much more interesting."

So the following morning, despite a big argument that night,
and Dan and Dawn's bowing out at the last minute, they did as
Eileen wanted. The other couple, Al and April, were two aging
hippies -- who referred to themselves as
"newageinarians" -- from San Francisco. They lit up
joints and attempted to pass them around. Nobody in the van
accepted, except for the driver, who exhaled the smoke in the
face of the securely bound chicken which lay beside him.

"This is just fucking great," Marty said. "I'm
so glad I came. Thank you Eileen. Thank you a thousand
times."

"Don't spoil this, you bastard," she snarled.
"For once I'm having a good time. She took the joint from
the driver and inhaled some grass, avoiding the wet end as much
as possible. "Is it far?" she asked the Indian at the
wheel as she gave the joint to April.

"Holy man live in cave up on mountain. Today good day. He
comes out of cave on good days."

"How do you know?" Marty asked. "You phone him
or something?"

"He is very holy," the driver said with a little
laugh.

"What's his name?"

"Holy man is called Rama Om," replied the driver.
"You sick, he can cure you. You sad, he make you happy.
Whatever you know, he knows also."

"Sounds like my mother," Marty quipped.

"Yes. He is like mother. Like everybody's mother,"
the driver replied.

After a lengthy journey up winding mountain roads, the van
finally came to a stop at the crest of an escarpment overlooking
a defile in which a muddy river sluggishly flowed. Not far from a
small cave, a figure was seated in the lotus position on the bare
ground.

The driver approached first, bowed reverently, and then spoke
to the holy man, telling him that foreign devils had come to seek
an audience. The driver next presented the holy man with the now
moderately stoned chicken, leaving it tied up on the ground. The
holy man beckoned to the four other people who had disembarked
the van to draw near him.

"Fire your stockbroker, Marty," he said to Marty,
"he's ripping you off."

"This is a joke, right?"

"No joke," the driver said, shaking his head.
"Rama Om knows all. This I tell you before." On the
fringes, the chicken squawked halfheartedly, as if in assent.

"Give me the medicines," the holy man next declared,
addressing the two aging hippies standing to one side of Marty
and Eileen. "I would like to try them."

Al reached into the stash pocket of his serape and held out
two gelatin capsules filled with white powder. He placed them in
the cupped palm of the holy man's extended hand. Rama Om asked Al
if there were any more. Al gave him another two capsules.

"Look, guy," he warned the holy man, his face
wearing a pinched, worried look. "You better not do this. We
believe you."

Rama Om swallowed the four LSD capsules anyway. For several
long minutes, he sat contemplating his audience with a faint
smile. Otherwise his expression was completely blank and he did
not move a muscle.

"This is interesting, but it is not the genuine bhiksu,"
Rama Om finally said.

"I don't believe this!" an awed Al
exclaimed. "He should be going apeshit by now with all that
acid in him!"

"Far out," April asserted boisterously. "Far
fuckin' out!"

"Bullshit. It's a setup," grumbled Marty.
"These two guys are shills." He meant the two from
Frisco. "And the old guy on the ground is a con man."

"Hey, who you fuckin' calling 'shills,' asshole?" Al
replied.

"You, dickwad," Marty hollered back.

"Behave yourself, Marty," Eileen warned her husband.

"Okay. We'll see who's an asshole. I wonder if you could
tell me the address of my orthopedist?" asked Al of Rama Om.

"You do not have an orthopedist," returned the holy
man. "But you have a dentist named Doctor Driller, who
recently performed root canal surgery on your left rear
bicuspid."

"See, you putz," Al yelled at Marty. "This
guy's for real!"

The holy man then turned to Marty, and said, "The
vegetable peeler you have lost has fallen behind the dish
washer."

"What?" Marty looked stunned. "What did you
say?"

"The vegetable peeler you lost last spring," Rama Om
repeated placidly. "When you return to your apartment you
will now have two."

There was no way this guy could have known about the vegetable
peeler, Marty knew. He had forgotten all about it himself until
Rama Om had brought it up. It was a little thing that had nagged
at him in a major way, like a hangnail. Marty had used the peeler
to make his Sunday morning cucumber salads until it had
disappeared. Despite turning the apartment upside down he'd never
found it. Ultimately he had bought a new one.

Marty felt as though someone had just brained him with a
two-by-four. Now suddenly he too knew that Rama Om was everything
he had previously not accepted him as being. He knew that Rama Om
was for real.

Marty was not at that time aware of what Zen adepts called
"the transmission of the lamp," but this is what in
fact had occurred. Yin and yang had begun to pivot on the axis of
infinity. The veils of illusion had begun to part. Enlightenment
glowed through the mists of maya.

It took another six months before Marty became Tulku. Back on
the Upper East Side, in familiar surroundings, his experience in
India could for a time be dismissed as an unimportant trifle. But
ultimately there could be no denying what had taken place.

Marty had received enlightenment. Nothing looked quite the
same to him anymore. Not the Upper East Side. Not his job. Not
Eileen. Not the ponies. Nothing.

"Marty, it's not normal you meditating in the middle of
the living room all day," Eileen would tell him on Saturdays
as he practiced the samadhi exercises he had learned at
Club Med. "Let's go out for brunch."

Marty stared at the mandala on the floor and did not
utter a word in answer to his wife. On occasions such as these
Eileen customarily left the house in tears.

Though Marty continued to go through the motions of his
obsolete existence, it was nevertheless crumbling all around him.
He still rode the Lex to his office every morning, still
performed his salaried duties, still returned home at day's end.
But these were mechanical functions. The wheel of samsara
still turned, though Marty felt its motions inexorably grinding
to a halt.

Soon it would stop entirely and begin to turn in the other
direction. Soon yang would become yin and samsara
transcendence.

"I'm leaving you, Marty," Eileen told him one day,
over the phone, while he was at work. She was calling from her
lawyer's office, she said.

"The bridge flows. The water does not," Marty told
her and promptly hung up.

He returned home to an empty apartment. All the furniture had
been taken away by Iraqi immigrants from the Nice Jewish Boy with
a Van company and even the carpet had been stripped from the
floor. Marty smiled. In the midst of turmoil he was at peace. See
how it all dissolves, he thought. Eileen was a cosmic
catalyst, an embodiment of the shiva principle, helping
along the dissolution of the old Marty into his new dharma
body. On the bare floor lay the only thing she had left him. His mandala.

Marty sat on the floor facing the mandala and tucked
his legs under him. He rested his hands on his knees and began to
perform his breath control exercises. He stared at the mandala
until it opened up and his consciousness entered its sacred
portals. There, he saw a vision of himself squatting atop the
steam grate of a building on Park Avenue, and he knew the name he
was destined to take.

Tulku.

The following day Marty went into his boss' office to tell him
he was quitting. Marty bowed respectfully and apologized for not
giving the company two weeks' notice, but his dharma
compelled him to act immediately. Marty left the office and went
to his bank where he transferred all the money in the joint
account he still retained with his wife over to Eileen.

He was now penniless. Technically, he could still occupy his
apartment for another sixty days because the month's rent had
been paid and the month's security was still in force, but he did
not want to remain chained to the cosmic wheel a moment longer
than was necessary. Tulku had no possessions. No connections to
the world of illusion held Tulku in thrall. Tulku needed only
Tulku and the enduring light within.

By that afternoon, Tulku had found the steam grate outside the
Lincoln Building that he had seen in his prophetic vision while
meditating before the mandala. Below the grating,
immense pipes carried waste steam from the fifty story
skyscraper's boiler room up to street level where it could vent
into the air in warm, humid clouds of stale-smelling vapor. Tulku
was now without food, without shelter, with nothing except the
clothes on his back.

But Tulku did not care. Though it was late autumn and the
nights were growing chilly, the steam would suffice to warm his
body. If Tibetan holy men trekked the frozen Himalayan wastes
with only the flimsiest robes for protection, Tulku could survive
on his steam grate on Park Avenue. All that mattered was that he
had severed himself from the wheel of samsara. Whether
he lived or died was beside the point. All consequences would
flow from his act of casting off his chains. Events would begin
to shape themselves.

Autumn became winter. Tulku sometimes augmented the warming
power of the steam that rose from beneath the grate with a large
cardboard box scrounged from trash awaiting pickup on the
curbside. Otherwise, his daily regimen seldom varied.

He sat in deep meditation, never looking at passersby, never
speaking unless addressed. When asked to move on by the doormen
of adjacent buildings, Tulku moved on, but inevitably returned to
his steam grate. Though he never begged for alms, passersby
frequently threw coins into his lap. With these donations, Tulku
bought what little food he required to sustain his life in nearby
coffee shops and delicatessens, where he also relieved what
meager bodily wastes his virtuous life produced.

During these times, Tulku sometimes chanced to glance at
himself in the bathroom mirrors, or glimpsed his reflection in
the plate glass windows of the neighborhood shops. The
reflections were of an enlightened being wholly different from
the mundane terrestrial dross that had once been Marty Kellerman.

This new being's hair grew long and matted, and an equally
long, thick beard covered his face. The frame upon which the
crazy quilt assortment of ragged clothes hung was gaunt to the
point of emaciation. Yet Tulku moved with a slow, graceful gait
that the ever-hurrying Marty had never displayed.

No other homeless people ever tried to usurp Tulku's position
on the steam grate. Some revered him as a saint, others feared
him as a sorcerer, but all left him in peace. When Tulku
reassumed his position atop the grate and commenced his
meditations, the bliss he experienced radiated from him from
avenue to avenue and from block to block.

Time passed, and it was again early fall. Tulku had spent
another round of seasons atop his grate, and had ascended to yet
a higher plane of enlightenment. To the residents of the
neighborhood Tulku had by now become a legend. Dogs, leashed and
stray alike, would stop to lick his hands. Young girls and little
boys would bestrew his steam grate with flowers. Stories
circulated about how the wizened homeless man squatting atop a
steam grate would spontaneously divulge extraordinary things
about people whom he had never before met, accurately foretelling
their futures and revealing long-buried secrets from their pasts.

There was, for example, the heart specialist who had scoffed
when Tulku had told him he had three weeks to live, but died
exactly three weeks later, struck by a crosstown bus in front of
Tulku's steam grate. There was the Lotto pool of doormen which
accurately played the winning number Tulku had given them. There
was the blind woman who could suddenly see, after accidentally
striking Tulku with her cane, the mugger who beheld God when
attempting to steal Tulku's meager alms, and countless other
stories of a similar sort. Some, including beat cops, cab
drivers, and other reputable witnesses, even claimed to have seen
Tulku levitate above his gridiron perch, amid a pungent cloud of
rising steam.

One of the new arrivals to the neighborhood, a young
stockbroker named Adam North, had also heard these stories,
although he disbelieved them and scoffed at those who gave them
credence. His wife, Beth, had told him about the holy man of Park
Avenue and said that she had personally witnessed the snow
melting around him due to some strange, inner energy which his
person gave off. Adam, a graduate of Princeton University, who
held a Masters degree in Business Administration, was a
dollar-and-cents man and ridiculed such superstitious tales as
nonsensical hogwash.

Besides, he had more important things to think about, such as
how to keep his six-figure-a-year job with Merrill Lynch.
Responsible for handling the investments of some of the firm's
most high-profile clients, he was a sleek greyhound running the
financial fast-track. There was no going back for Adam. In his
world you were either moving forward or falling behind, and those
who fell behind were toast.

Adam had, of course, passed Tulku's steam grate every day on
his way to and from the Lex, and frequently on weekends when he
went down to buy the paper and bagels and lox for breakfast.
Often he even passed Tulku's flower-strewn grate in the company
of his wife.

But on all those occasions, Adam had deliberately not looked
Tulku's way. He shut the squatting mendicant from his mind, just
as he expelled all the city's other homeless beggars from his
thoughts. Adam didn't believe in giving charity to these
parasites. On the contrary, his attitude was that they should be
taken somewhere en masse and put out of their misery. This
so-called "guru" was no different from the others. He
was just a whacko with mental problems. Why should Adam make
anything special of him?

Just the same, on one cold winter evening when Adam had drunk
a little too much with some clients after work, he reached into
his pocket on a whim as he passed the steam grate and tossed a
handful of change into Tulku's lap. Tulku did not, as usual, so
much as glance up to acknowledge the gift, and Adam, with a
little snort of drunken laughter, prepared to hurry upstairs to
his duplex condo.

"Thank you, Adam," Tulku said before his benefactor
had a chance to take his first step, and the remark stopped Adam
cold in his tracks.

"How did you know my name?" he asked Tulku. "My
wife told you, right? Or you overheard it on the street."

Tulku was now uncharacteristically looking up at Adam, and
Adam's first thought was that his eyes were beautiful. They were
two large, round pools, within whose limpid depths a great wisdom
seemed to stir.

"Why do you hate me, Adam?" Tulku asked in a soft
voice. "Is it because you fear what you will become?"

"Hey, I don't hate you, and I certainly don't fear
you," Adam retorted with a show of contempt that surprised
him. "And I sure as hell won't ever become
you."

"Do not grieve for your brother Edward. He forgives
you," Tulku said.

Adam gave Tulku a long, steely stare. He opened his mouth to
say something, but Tulku had already turned his face to the
sidewalk and had sunk into deep meditation. Adam hurried home
through the biting wind, thinking to himself that there was no
possible way that the guy could have known about Eddie.

Twenty-one years before, Adam's kid brother had drowned in a
lake near Allentown, Pennsylvania, the town where he had grown
up. Nobody knew that he had been responsible for Eddie's death.
It had been an accident and he had never told anybody about it.
Not his wife, not his parents, not the cops, though they'd tried
every trick in the book to get it out of him. Yet somehow, the
homeless guy had known all about what happened, just as though
he'd been able to read Adam's thoughts.

That night, Adam continued the drinking he had begun at the
bar near his office, and his wife had begun to be more concerned
than she usually was on such occasions.

When she persisted, he went into the bathroom and locked
himself inside, sitting on the toilet seat with the neck of the
bottle gripped tightly in his hand.

The following day, Adam stood in front of the holy man. Tulku
looked up, his face a tabula rasa.

"How did you know about Eddie?" he asked.

"Do not fear this knowledge," Tulku replied.
"He does not blame you. I do not care."

"I asked you how you know," Adam pressed.

"I do not know how I know," Tulku answered with a
guilelessness that could not be disbelieved. "I just
know."

"Okay," Adam said with a nod. "Tell me some
more, then."

Tulku did. He told Adam about things Adam had not only told no
one else about, but did not even realize he himself knew. Adam
was dumbfounded, and he hurried away again, unable to accept what
his eyes and ears revealed to him. When he told Beth about the
conversation later on, she was amazed. She was even more amazed
to hear Adam announce his intention to have the holy man come up
to the apartment as a guest.

If you would like me to go with you, I will," Tulku said
when Adam put the question to him on the cold, darkened street
sometime later that evening. Rising from his steam grate, he
followed Adam along the street.

Upstairs, Tulku sat in the Norths' living room and meditated,
showing the Norths how to do the basic yoga postures and
breathing exercises he had himself learned a lifetime before,
while vacationing at Club Med.

Adam's invitations to Tulku became more frequent as he and Beth
became more involved in yoga meditation exercises. Adam began
growing a beard, and eating macrobiotic foods. His after-work
drinking stopped and his interest in money and how to manipulate
it began to be replaced by concerns of a more spiritual nature.
For his part, Tulku began to become a fixture at the North
household, often staying overnight at their behest. Meanwhile,
flowers continued to strew his steam grate and alms were left at
its side, even when he was no longer there.

Early one morning, Adam rose from the crosslegged meditation
posture that he, Beth and Tulku had assumed on the living room
carpet to leave for work. After he was gone, Beth spoke candidly
to Tulku.

"I've been meaning to tell you about something," she
said to him. "But I don't know how exactly."

"Speak," he said to her. "Just say it."

"I want to have sex with you," Beth told him.

Tulku looked at Beth without registering any emotion.

"If you would like me to have sex with you," he told
her, "then I will have sex with you."

Afterward, Beth told Tulku that she had felt herself levitate
when she climaxed. It was definitely a religious experience, she
went on. She didn't feel dirtied by it or anything. She didn't
even feel like she had cheated on Adam or anything either. In
fact, she felt as if it somehow bound them all together even more
closely now.

How did Tulku feel about it, she wondered? Did he feel the
same way?

Tulku just looked at her.

"The buffalo down the hill," is all he said in
reply.

Several days later, as they sat in the Norths' living room,
Adam came to Tulku with a request of his own.

"I believe your steam grate is a holy place," he
told Tulku. "I would like to sit there."

"If you would like to sit on my steam grate," Tulku
told him, "then sit on my steam grate."

Adam's hair and beard had grown into a long, thick mass of
tangled curls by now, and with the layers of clothing he wore to
keep out the November chill, he looked enough like Tulku to be
his fraternal twin. With his head bowed in meditation, none of
the passersby on the street had any inkling that Tulku was in
fact up in the Norths' bedroom having sex with Adam's wife Beth,
or that Beth's climaxes were of consistently cosmic proportions.

The following morning was a Saturday, and Beth awoke to find
Tulku meditating in the lotus position on his side of the
spacious, queen-sized bed. She pecked him on the cheek, and
informed him that she had just had a visionary inspiration.

"Share it," Tulku told her.

"I was thinking you should cut your hair and shave off
your beard," she explained to Tulku. "You would look
much cuter that way."

"If that is what you would like to do, then cut my hair
and shave my beard," he informed Beth.

A little while later, Tulku was shown his image in the mirror
that Beth held out in front of him. She had cut his hair and
shaved his beard, just as she had seen in her vision.

"You know, you look a lot like Adam this way," she
remarked. "Even a little better. In fact, you could be his
brother. It's just amazing."

Later that morning, Tulku, wearing a quilted goose-down parka
and tailored jeans was sent down to Gristede's to buy bagels and
lox and then to the candy store to fetch the Sunday newspapers.
On his way to the store, he passed the steam grate where Adam sat
meditating.

Peeling open one of the parka's Velcro pockets and reaching
inside, Tulku came up with a handful of loose change which he
tossed to Adam, and knew that yin and yang had once again
completed another permutation of their eternal mystic dance.
Adam, who had become Tulku, did not look up, and Tulku, now Adam,
hurried to the store, his mind on Beth's shopping list.